Harold Bindloss - Alton of Somasco

“They usually have,” said the girl. “I do not, however, know Mrs. Jimmy.”

“Of course,” said Alton, smiling. “Still, I expect you’ll see her up here presently.”

It was a day or two later when Alton returned to the topic of Mrs. Jimmy, and he was then kneeling in the stern of a canoe which slid with a swift smoothness down the placid lake as he dipped the glistening paddle. Miss Deringham was seated forward on a pile of cedar-twigs, with a wet line in her fingers, and in no way disturbed by the fact that she had caught nothing. Such expeditions had become somewhat frequent of late, and though the girl sometimes wondered what she found to please her in the company and conversation of the bush rancher, the fact that she usually went with him when he crossed the lake remained.

“I have seen that trail of smoke up there before. Where does it come from?” she said languidly, pointing to a distant film of vapour that drifted in a faint blue wreath along the slope of a hill.

“That,” said Alton, “is the Tyee mine.”

“I have heard of it. They find silver there?”

“Yes,” said Alton dryly. “They find a little.”

“There is silver in those mountains, then?” said Miss Deringham.

Alton nodded. “Lots of it. Still, it costs a good deal to get out, and then it doesn’t pay for the mining occasionally. That’s the trouble with the Tyee.”

“Still, it must pay somebody, or they would not go on,” said Miss Deringham.

Alton laughed a little. “Oh, yes,” he said dryly. “It pays a man called Hallam and some others of his kind who got up the company. Still, sometime and somehow, I think he will be sorry he stole poor folks’ money.”

“You,” said Miss Deringham, smiling, “are an optimist, then?”

Alton gravely glanced about him, and the girl fancied she understood him as she followed his gaze from snowpeak down the great pine-shrouded hillside to the river frothing in the valley. “I don’t know, but one feels there’s something beyond all that,” he said. “It didn’t come there by accident, and it has all its work to do. Sun and frost and sliding snow grinding up the hillside very sure and slow, and the river sweeping what it gets from them way down the valley to spread new wheatfields out into the sea.”

“But,” said Miss Deringham, smiling, “we are speaking of men, and I don’t quite see the connection.”

“Well,” said Alton, “they have their place in the great machine too, and must work like the rest, and do something to make it more fruitful, in return for the food the good earth gives them.”

“A good many men don’t seem to realize the obligation,” said Miss Deringham.

Alton nodded. “No, but I can’t help thinking they’ll be dealt with somehow. They’re just stealing from the others.”

“You are a socialist, then?”

“No,” said Alton, “I don’t think I am. It seems to me that every man is entitled to all the dollars he can get by working for them honestly, and there’s a place somewhere in this great world for him, if he has the grit to get up and look for it as he was meant to do, but it has no use for the man who wants to sit still and think about his dinner while other folks work for him.”

“Still, he may have earned the right to do so,” said the girl.

“Well,” said Alton grimly, “most of that kind I’ve met with seemed to have stolen it, and one or two of them had, for a few thousand dollars, sent good men to their death. When you’ve seen your comrades sickening and starving on rotten provisions in the snow, or washed out down the valley by the bursting of a dam that was only built to sell, you begin to wonder whether it would be wrong to wipe out some of that crowd with the rifle.”

The veins swelled on his forehead, and there was a smouldering fire in his eyes, while the girl suspected he was alluding to some especial member of the class, and noticed that his eye seemed to follow the smoke of the Tyee. Then he laughed.

“I guess I’m talking nonsense again, but there’s a little behind it, and I feel that you can pick it out,” he said. “Now I’m not good at amusing women, but you and Mrs. Jimmy seem to understand me.”

“Who is Mrs. Jimmy, and does her husband belong to Somasco?” asked the girl, with a smile.

Alton laid down the paddle, and took off his hat. “Jimmy,” he said solemnly, “is dead. He was my partner, and his wife is a friend of mine. She was in some ways very like you.”

“They had a ranch up here?” said Miss Deringham languidly.

“No,” said Alton. “It wasn’t often they had ten dollars. She was a lady bar-keep down in Vancouver before she married Jimmy. He was a trail-chopper in this country. I don’t know what he was in the old one.”

“And,” said Miss Deringham, “Mrs. Jimmy resembles me?”

She regretted it next moment when she saw Alton’s face. It expressed subdued surprise, and the girl felt irritated with herself.

“Yes,” he said gravely. “Human nature’s much the same at the bottom, whether it has gold on the top of it or the dints of the hammer, and Mrs. Jimmy was good all through.”

“That,” said Miss Deringham, “is distinctly pretty.”

“Well,” said Alton smiling, “I didn’t mean it that way. Work was scarce in the province, and I’d lost my cattle when Jimmy went up with me into the ranges to look for silver. He brought his wife along, because he had no dollars or anywhere to leave her, and it was a mighty tough place for a woman where we camped under the big glacier. We stayed right there most of the winter. There was only frost and snow, and the wind that whirled it about the pines, and, until it froze up, we lived a good deal on salmon from the river. They were dead when we got them, and some of them rotten.”

Miss Deringham shivered. “And when the river froze?” she said.

“Then,” said Alton gravely, “there were days when we lived on nothing, and worked until we couldn’t hold the pick to keep from thinking. Still, we got a deer now and then, and we had a very little flour. It was mouldy when we bought it, but we hadn’t dollars enough for anything better. Mrs. Jimmy got sick and thin, but she never grumbled, and was always waiting bright and smiling when we crawled back into the shanty. Anyway, we found no silver that would pay for the getting, though we knew it was there.”

“How did you know that?” said Miss Deringham.

“Well,” said Alton, “a Siwash told us something. He crawled in starving one day, and though we hadn’t much over we fed him. For another thing we felt it in us that we were on the right trail.”

“That,” said the girl, “does not sound possible.”

Alton nodded. “No,” he said. “Still, one gets taught up there in the bush that there’s more in a man than what some folks think of as his reason. Well, we made a tough fight, and were beaten.”

Miss Deringham glanced at him covertly, and noticing his quiet, bronzed face, steady eyes, and big brown hands, felt that the struggle had been very grim and stubborn. “So you gave it up?” she said.

“Yes,” said Alton, “for a time, and I had my hands full with other things when Jimmy went back again. He had piled up a few dollars and left the woman behind him. He took the trail with a good outfit and a pack-horse, but he didn’t come down again, and when Mrs. Jimmy got anxious I went up to look for him. It was a good while before I found him sitting under a pine, and he had found the silver, though it wasn’t much use to him.”

“Was it a rich vein?” said the girl.

“Yes,” said Alton solemnly, “I think it was, from the specimens he had brought along, but, and it’s difficult sometimes to see why things should happen that way, he couldn’t tell me where it was. Jimmy was dead, you see.”